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Posts Tagged ‘listening’

Sometimes When I’m Quiet, I Think of Art Goodtimes

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on March 9, 2026| 6 Comments »


 
 
I hear the beat of his hand on the drum as he chants,
We are an old people, we are a new people, we are
the same people deeper than before. I have seen
his body explode with poetic energy, sparks leaping
from his fingers, his full voice booming inside my cells
like monsoon thunder in the mountains, and knowing
how big he can be, I feel his restraint as he sits in a circle
and listens, taming all that shakti into quiet attention
as the gourd is passed from person to person and stories
and songs and poems are shared and Art shows us how it’s done,
how together we weave the heart strands into a basket of communion,
and there no strand not welcome—thick ropes of sorrow, gold
threads of devotion, the spidery gray strands of loneliness,
red silk of holiness, scratchy gray of desolation, the deep forest
green of elation—and the circle is always and never the same,
and Art calls us in again and again to aliveness, to share
what matters, beating his drum in time with our hearts
saying welcome, welcome, welcome.

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One Deep Listening

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on February 23, 2026| Leave a Comment »


 
 
inside the prickly silence
a generous silence—
in the desert, a hidden spring

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Big Conversation

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on February 18, 2026| 18 Comments »



 
 
I’ve become the person who talks to avocados.
Oh, look how ripe you are!
The one who talks to dust bunnies under the bed.
Oh, my goodness. How long have you been there?
I’ve become the person who narrates wind as it gusts,
the one who composes out loud while writing poems.
In short, I’m the person who once mystified me.
Does she really think lettuce seeds can hear her?
And I love being this woman who converses with stars,
with shadows, this person who notices feelings that rise
as I move through a day and takes pleasure in greeting them.
Hello shame. I say. Hello fear. Hello embarrassment.
How much easier life is when I join in the big conversation.
Then I am never alone. Not that the bananas talk back.
Neither does the mop. But that doesn’t stop me
from being curious about my connection with all of it—
the stain on the dishtowel, the pond as it melts,
the broken pot, the robin in the yard, the highway trash.
It’s not the talking part I love, but letting my attention
touch everything. Cracked glass. A lost glove. Tire tracks.
Mostly, I love the listening for what isn’t said back.

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Survival

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on February 3, 2026| 2 Comments »

 

                  with thanks to Brian McLaren
 
 
Sometimes when I deeply listen,
the seeds of another’s words
land in the soil of me.
Days later, the roots of what
they said are still tendrilling
into my dendrites, and
through synaptic miracle grow,
soon my whole neural network
has lit up, blooming with a new
way of thinking. Like last week
when I heard a man ask,
How does my rage help me
stay on the path of love?
He was responding to a question
he heard me ask in response
to a question I heard someone
else ask. And this is how listening
transforms the world. We adapt
through cross-pollination.
Your thoughts and my thoughts
breed something new—like
this love and rage hybrid now growing
in me. Diversity is the key to survive.
The paths are always changing.

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Sometimes, I Forget How to Listen

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on February 1, 2026| 6 Comments »


 
Listen with the ear of your heart.
from the Prologue to the Rule of Saint Benedict
 
Because words can be rubber bullets,
can be pepper spray, can be cuffs.
Scared, my ears become rabbits
that burrow and hide. Angry,
my ears become stone gates
that refuse to let anything in.
It’s so painful to hear
the rhetoric of hate. Burns
like tear gas. Stuns and disorients
like flash-bang grenades.
No part of me then can believe
there is a sliver of divinity in you
that I want or need to listen to.
It is so hard to listen.
What if we do not listen?
I want to train my ears to hear
beneath the invective. Want
to listen beneath the attack.
What if I could hear the human
in you and not only the weapons
of your words? What if you could hear
the human in me and find a piece
of yourself? What if we left all our mouths
at home and let only our ears
gather in the streets?
Would we hear, then, the sounds
of each other’s breath, proof
of our mutual humanness?
What peace might arrive for a moment
if we listened, all of us miracles,
softening into that generous silence,
listening with the ears of our hearts
as the cold wind swirls all around?

*after reading “My Mouth (An Apology)” by Tom Holmes

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On Listening

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged on December 29, 2025| Leave a Comment »


 
 
Whatever it is in us
that knows how to listen,
that. I want to align
myself with that
until deep listening
is common and astonishing
as starlight.
Until I am so humbled
by the holiness of the world
around and inside us
I feel myself moored
by the strong rope
of silence that tethers me
to every other voice,
to every other silence
and tugs me toward
what marvel I can
not know.

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Right Here

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on October 30, 2025| 2 Comments »


 
 
Not easy to hear the soft chant of my breath
with the rumble of river nearby.
Even the low water hymn of late autumn
is loud enough to cover the small,
familiar song of inhale and exhale.
Further out is the sharp thwack of hammer
head meeting nail. Another nail. Another.
An elated whoop from the man with the hammer.
And further out, the growl of semi trucks
migrating east on the highway. If I close
my eyes, do I really hear better? Can I hear
into the distant pinion forest, the silence that gathers
there in spiraling trunks? Can I hear
past that into the vaster silence of mesa?
To the vacant sound of sky?
More than the sounds themselves,
something about the reaching stills me,
brings me present until I am more ear
than mind. Not a single thought brays as I follow
soundwaves to the shores of presence.
Such simple practice, attentiveness,
and yet how often I wander away
on paths of should and want. But now,
attuned, I hear it, even with the river,
this small luff of breath, a living metronome
beating here, here, here.  

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When Bert Sends Me an Mp4

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on October 29, 2025| 6 Comments »


 
 
Though she’s been dead more than a year,
Donna sings to me through the recording,
her voice bold as she belts into Ladder Canyon
a song of celebration and goodbye.
The cancer by then was a longtime companion.
She laughs as the lyrics bounce off of sandstone,
and then she starts leaving space for listening:
And all I’ve done      (   I’ve done      I’ve done  )
for want of wit      (  of wit      of wit   ).
When the first verse is sung, she exclaims,
“That was fantastic!” Years later, the echo
resounds, though it comes in the sound
of my own voice pealing around my own room,
“That was fantastic!”  I shout back. And it was.
Fantastic to feel her again in the drums of my ears,
in the hum of my throat, in the thrum of my blood.
Fantastic to hear her singing those words we have sung
together how many thousands of times. But this time,
Donna’s not singing to blend. She’s shouting it out
like a shanty, haunted by shadows and lit up by life.
I’m so stunned by her voice, I don’t even try to sing along.
I absorb every wave of her, as if I could take her all in
and not have to give her back to death.
I play it again and again. Every time, I echo back,
“That was fantastic.” And by that, I mean the echo
in the canyon. I mean the song. I mean the gift
of hearing her voice again. Fantastic. I mean her life.
Fantastic. I mean her. I mean her. I mean her.

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One Not Just with the Ears

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on October 13, 2025| 3 Comments »

teaching our voices
to kneel to each other—
such a genuine way to listen

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Dear Mr. Whitman,

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on September 20, 2025| 13 Comments »


 
I want to hear America singing
all those varied carols you mentioned.
But it’s noise now, Walt, more shouting 
than song. As if volume makes a leader.
Any singer knows being louder
just makes discord, and harmony
needs constant attunement
to every other singer.
I want to hear America listening.
Want a citizen chorus that knows
our voices are only as good as our ears.
I want a new song that begins
with a silence that stretches 
from sea to shining sea—
the kind of silence that holds
every one of us, every part of us.
And when the many parts do arise, 
glorious in their differences,
I want to hear inside them 
the careful attention that tunes
them to each other, I want to hear 
in our song the deep listening that makes
even the most uncomfortable dissonance 
beautiful.

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